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What Goes On Within AMD's Linux Beta Program?

Phoronix: What Goes On Within AMD's Linux Beta Program?

This year NVIDIA has been following the release early, release often mantra with it seeming like two weeks can't even go by without seeing a new Linux driver -- whether it's a beta driver, an official driver update, or one of their legacy drivers picking up a few fixes (at times they have even released four drivers at once). On the opposite spectrum, AMD continues with monthly Catalyst driver updates on both Linux and windows. Rather than a continual stream of new public driver releases, AMD maintains a private beta program for their Catalyst Linux driver. This private program is made up of AMD developers, hardware vendors, users of different Linux distributions, other Linux vendors, and end-users. Phoronix has been apart of this program for years, but those testing this driver are under a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement with AMD regarding pre-releases of their Linux software. Today, however, AMD has decided to declassify some information pertaining to its Linux Graphics Driver Beta Program.

I think a closed beta program is ok in a beginning stage of a new development which definitely contains bugs that you do not want to explain any new user. But after a while things calm down and most of the major bugs are resolved. If you don't have to expect damage to your pc/data with it, then those pre official release drivers should be made available. I don't think that would hurt ATI in any way, but they would get more feedback. There are lots of people out here who have got problems with the fglrx driver, and the only hope for em is a new driver, so restricting access for em means waiting 2-3 months longer than needed if there would be a fix inbetween. If you want a fast solution then you have to buy a new card. NV has problems with some specific cards which have not been sorted out yet too, but at least they provide more updates when they introduce something new like VDPAU which needs more fixes. Before VDPAU/KDE4 you mainly only got a few updates, much less than the 12 for fglrx udpates a year. But before KDE4 there have been only few complains about NV and for every new kernel you got patches to make the current drivers work with it. That's the absolute minimum requirement that ATI has to do: provide OFFICIAL kernel patches even for legacy drivers.

More on AMD's Linux release cycle and philosophy can be found in The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux.

I have seen this mistake so often on Phoronix, so now I must mention it

It is bad practice to start a sentence or head line with "More on" because it sounds like "Moron" when you read it.

You will never see a news paper do that.

One of my English profs explained the importance of thinking through
sentence structure so as not to be phonetically or grammatically
careless, i.e. 'Me and Jim went to the arcade' as it could sound like
'Mean Jim went to the arcade', proper grammar is 'Jim and I went to
the arcade.'